My Uneven Journey to Manhood

This is an edited version of an assignment for my African American Studies 109 class, called "Black Men in American Life." The assignment was to write how I learned to become a man (and for the women in the class, it was how they've come to learn what a man is).

I was born to working-class Salvadoran immigrant parents in 1987 in Los Angeles, CA, two years and eight months after my brother Andy. According to my mother, I was quite attached to her even as a baby, something that would persist into childhood, and in a different and less emotionally dependent way, even now. What that effectively means is that my father and I shared a different kind of relationship, such that up until the day he died, I believe he may have thought that I did not really love him, which was definitely not the case. The reason why I begin with my emotional attachment to my mother as a child is because it is an essential component to my formation, and thus, important to understand who I am today.

As a young boy, I would cry if I were ever separated from my mother, be it at family gatherings when my mother would leave my side to go dance or when she would drop me off with a babysitter. In fact, I recall my mother telling me later in life that, as a baby, I would refuse to let my father carry me; I’d cry if he tried. Thus, I recognize in retrospect an early emotional attachment and dependency upon my mother, which did not allow me to bond with my father in the conventional ways between father and son, the ways in which he did with my older brother. They shared sports, two father/son trips to El Salvador, among other things—a relationship that I now in retrospect realize I envied subconsciously. Because of this inadequate conventional “male” father/son relationship with my father, I was always an outsider observing and left to my own devices in terms of surrounding myself with diverse influences that affected my ways of thinking and my own masculinity. Also, though I was not “conventionally masculine,” and having some obvious “feminine” traits, I was still “masculine” in the sense that I was not “feminine”; that is, I was still “acceptable” but not “optimal”: I played with cars, I listened to the rap, hip hop, and R&B my “masculine” brother listened to, I watched “straight porn” through the scrambles on cable television with my brother, I watched wrestling and even wrestled with my brother, (notice that I did not do things out of my own volition, but through my brother as a sort of middle man). As young children, my brother and I would play together; but as we grew older, he progressively gravitated towards our older cousin Wilbert, and I gravitated toward my younger cousin Natalie, both because I enjoyed playing with her and because I no longer had the same relationship with my brother as I did before due to the two-year age gap as well as his forward-looking masculine ambitions (i.e., learning from our older cousin), which I could not provide.

Things began to change for me in the “upper level” grades in elementary school; I had my first major female crush, I was obsessed with the female body and watching it through the aforesaid “porn-through-the-scrambles,” and I craved learning about sex—while maintaining my timid and naïve outward appearance. But I still could not catch up to my brother, who I always looked up to, as well as my ambitious and intelligent father, the one who had become a white-collar worker despite the fact that he did not even have a high school diploma—the vehicle of sorts that led our family’s upward mobility. I was always around women (my mother, my single grandmother, my aunt, my female cousin, and my sister who was born when I was 6, whom I resented because she took my place as the ‘baby’ of the family as well as the fact that she was born 3 days after my sixth birthday), and that is why I admire them so much and am able to empathize (as much as I can, I must recognize my male privilege). They were the ones who supported me, counseled me, and gave me hope, and in the case of my female family members, spoiled me at the expense of my sister, which is something very characteristic of Spanish culture (and I’ve heard that it’s the same in some Arab cultures). Yet they were not able to provide something that was missing: men in my family drank alcohol and beer at family gatherings; they had very aggressive and commanding voices that were necessary for storytelling and joke-telling, skills that are important to have in my culture. I lacked something. In sixth grade, I attempted to assert my masculinity by trying to prove to my brother that I knew “a lot about sex,” to which he replied by asking me if I knew what “fingerbanging” was—I did not know, though of course I had a vague idea of what that was.

Though my brother did at times call me “faggot” because of some of my “feminine”/ “homosexual” tendencies, he proved to be a good man, and human in general, when he rebuked me for an insensitive remark I had made about gays, essentially saying that I should treat people all the same and “What difference does it make?” At the time I did not know that another cousin with whom my brother was close was gay and had come out to him, in addition to another out lesbian cousin we had. Though I did not come out to myself until 9^th grade, I take comfort in knowing that I would have been able to come out to my brother, and that he would love me unconditionally. In fact, He and my father were killed in 1999, the summer between elementary school and middle school, childhood and adolescence. This has also affected my masculinity, my being a man, because of a lack of immediate male influences, aside from my uncles on my mother’s side. I feel I have unfinished business with both my father and brother; but especially with my father, to whom I consciously started to have a father/son relationship that he understood in order to show him that I really did love him (we took our own father/son trip to Denver in 1998; and then he, my sister and I went on a trip to El Salvador later that year). In his own way of showing me his affection, he shared with me our family’s financial information, his income, our family savings account statements, his life insurance statements; in fact, he even allowed me to play an important role in helping him search for the perfect home for our family to buy—and this was when I was 11. In terms of my brother, I lived under his shadow in terms of masculinity (he was voted most popular in his 8^th grade class), but he lived under my shadow in terms of intelligence—but why can’t I have both, I have always asked myself.

In short, being a man are about asserting my own identity and rejecting social convention; but at the same time, ironically it is a constant challenge to be accepted and either subconsciously or consciously following social protocol. I ended the story with my father’s death not because my male influences end there but because my immediate influences ended along with them. As a child I was firmly grounded within the male gender, though as many of you can see I’ve long struggled to integrate both so-called male and female attributes. Recently I find myself gravitating toward what is deemed masculine, in terms of sexual preference in men, in artistic, gesture, music and fashion personal choices. I am not too far from the privileged gender, and the oppressive one, and I am not as tolerant as I formerly believed myself to be. But I’m working on it.